9 Comments
тна Return to thread

Being in California, the biggest annoyance is that all three would be great senators, and yet we can only have one. Two senators for 40 million people just feels so unfair.

Expand full comment

A damn shame they couldn't see that issue arising. Or maybe they could (Rhode Island vs. Virginia) and just couldn't get past it.

Since there's no way we're changing that part of the Constitution, I wonder if splitting large states is the answer. It'd take one party having both houses of congress and the Whitehouse or a big compromise, but it would get more representation out there.

Expand full comment

I've got this alternate reality scenario in mind where states are completely redrawn so every state is centered around a large city, and you reallocate the surrounding rural areas to try and reach population parity.

Expand full comment

I'd like to see a National Constitutional Convention. That would be worth watching on CSPAN with a ton of popcorn.

Expand full comment

Eh... While it would be really interesting, I'm not sure I want the stress of doing that while MAGA still exists.

Expand full comment

That's why we have to vote MAGA out of any kind of national power. Then a majority of the country would be empowered to make sensible Constitutional changes.

Expand full comment

It goes beyond that though. An article V convention is very vaguely defined. There are very few concrete rules governing how it should be run, how delegates are selected, etc.

Even if there wasn't a single MAGA representative at the federal level, you'd still have lots of bad actors at the state level, and people like billionaires looking to throw around their influence in harmful ways. It would be an incredibly dangerous thing at this moment in time. Even without MAGA, I'm not sure I trust the conservative elements in society to play fair. They certainly didn't prior to Trump, and there's no guarantee they will afterwards.

Expand full comment

That's the way (from our perspective) the (un)(Fair Founding Fathers wanted it: Slaves were 3/5ths of a man and women, even with the last three letters, did not rate anywhere on that, or the voting, chart.

Expand full comment

Women (and children) were always counted as whole persons in the apportionment calculus where the three-fifths bit resided. Apportionment is about residents, not voters or even citizens.

Expand full comment